Drug abuse and Crime

"With or without justification, drug abuse is often cited as a major cause of crime, violence, and family disruption across the United States," researcher Eric D. Wish states in the preface to the May 1992 volume of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1992, p. 8). In the aftermath of the cocaine "epidemic" of the 1980s and under the specter of AIDS in the present decade, the public outcry for action by local, state, and federal authorities is putting real pressure on lawmakers to act.

The question which continues to haunt every facet of the debate is, simply, in which direction(s) should we, as a nation, devote our energies and resources to eradicate drug abuse . . . or should we simply give up the fight, admit defeat, and find something else to worry about? This paper will examine some of the contemporary ideas and scholarly resea

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ey further speculate that the majority of the 254 subjects were already involved in "some sort of regular crime" before crack had even appeared in the Miami area, and that "the crack business is criminogenic in that it leads serious delinquents to become even more seriously involved in crime" (p. 268). Inciardi and Pottieger (1991) concluded that the crack-crime dynamic, insofar as adolescent dealers are concerned, "represents an intensified version of the classic drug-crime relationship originally described for (adult) heroin users. . . . (Y)oung crack dealers are astonishingly more involved in a drugs-crime lifestyle at an alarmingly younger age" (p. 269). Research by Deschenes, Anglin, and Speckart (1991) which documented the criminal activities of 243 heroin addicts over an 11 year period is highly corroborative of this conclusion. These researchers found that, including drug-related crimes, these 243 addicts accumulated a total of 473,738 crime-days, or about 178 days per year. If the one-year figures obtained by Inciardi and Pottieger are extrapolated over 11 years, they would reveal a more than five-fold difference in the amount of crack-related crime compared to that of the heroin addicts. What is common to bot
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Approximate Word count = 4601
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page)

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